У дослідженні проаналізовано теоретичні джерела і політичні наслідки статті московського
кінокритика М. Блеймана "Архаїсти чи новатори?" (1970), яку вважають обґрунтуванням заборони школи українського поетичного кіно як "безперспективного" напряму. Статтю М. Блеймана вміщено в контекст дискусії про поетичне і прозаїчне кіно, яку систематизовано щодо двох
підходів: нормативного, який вважає лише один із напрямів кіно релевантним його природі (йому
відповідає сполучник "чи"), і плюралістичного, який розглядає обидва напрями як актуалізації
різних кінематографічних потенцій згідно з тими завданнями, що ставлять режисери (йому відповідає сполучник "і").
The study is focused on the analysis of the theoretical sources and political consequences of the article
“Archaists or Innovators?” (1970) by Moscow based film critic M.Bleiman, which is considered to be a substantiation
of the ban of Ukrainian poetical cinema as a direction “with no prospect.” The major target of this
article became the films by S. Parajanov. Since M.Bleiman’s seminal article is quite a performative statement
disguised as a theoretical treatise, it is necessary to ask what it has done, rather than what it meant. Therefore,
its political consequences for Ukrainian cinema were studied first. Despite the similarity of the key words and
statements between this article and the authoritative discourse on cinema in the Ukrainian SSR after
V.Shcherbytsky’s coming to power, it is clear that repressive campaigns of so called ‘malanchukivshchyna’
would have been implemented even without the particular useful vocabulary provided by M. Bleiman. Moreover,
M. Bleiman’s criticism was aimed not at the national particularity of the poetical cinema, which became
the main target of repressive campaigns of ‘malanchukivshchyna’, but rather at the difficulty of its films. The
author proceeds to study the theoretical sources of M. Bleiman’s article. The article is placed in the context of
a wider discussion on cinematic poetry and prose in the Soviet cinema, which is systematized according to
two major approaches: a normative one, according to which only one direction in cinema is seen as relevant
to its nature (with the corresponding conjunction “or”), and a pluralistic one, according to which both directions
actualize different cinematic potencies in relation to different creative tasks (with the corresponding
conjunction “and”). While the Thaw Era film criticism, particularly such film critics as E. Dobin, M. Turovskaya,
L. Anninsky, and V. Fomin, developed a pluralistic approach to the Soviet cinema, M. Bleiman, recycling
the arguments advanced in the discussion on cinematic poetry and prose, regressed in his article to the
normative approach.
